I have a book of “notes about stuff” where I record ideas/research/conversations I’ve had/seminar stuff. These are just a few things that we’re looking at right now…

Things I’m thinking about:

1) Fitness training and fat loss training may not be related – something that improves fitness, might not have any effect whatsoever on fat loss and possibly vice versa.

In one of my talks I point out that if you were certified by ACE, NASM, NSCA and ISSA combined, you’d have read close to 3000 pages on exercise and less than 2% would be on fat loss.
Trainers therefore try to use “fitness training programming” to create fat loss. Might be completely wrong from the get go.

We’ve tried to program fitness and hope for fat loss as a side effect.
What if we were wrong all along, and the best fat loss training is something different? What if we’re using the wrong tool completely?

There might be no correlation between fitness training and fat loss training outside of energy expenditure. Basic example is aerobic training – it develops aerobic capacity but doesn’t seem to create fat loss.

Giving someone a traditional “fitness program” and just cutting calories/intake and “hoping” that fat loss happens is ass backward.

If it were just about a deficit (as so many claim) then it would be possible to “out train a bad diet”…..Trainers will constantly quote “you can’t out-train a bad diet”. If that’s true and you can’t outperform diet, then exercise itself doesn’t work based on our understanding of fat loss (ie energy expenditure). Because if that’s all there was to it, (calories in v calories out) then you could “out train” a poor diet.

What I’m suggesting is that there could be no relationship between improving aerobic capacity, muscular strength, endurance, speed, flexibility or whatever fitness component you want to name and reducing adipose tissue…..
Our very recommendations in our industry could be incorrect from the get-go.

2) We need to do a better job of integrating nutrition and training.
Up to now, that’s largely been interpreted as adjusting carb intake. I think there’s more to it.
e.g. how much EPA/DHA should a weight class athlete consume with regards to other fats and obviously fat soluble vitamins after week four of a heavy strength cycle using near maximal loading? That’s the level of integration I would like to see explored…

Everyone agrees nutrition should be different whether I’m trying to gain size or lose fat. But it should be different on strength days v metabolic days v rest days.

And not just carb intake.
We see drug/food/supplement interactions. What if the training/nutrition interactions could be eliminated or manipulated?
Perhaps nutrition should be periodized.

3) Soft tissue work may play a big role in metabolism, and we should explore that….
I think that even in a perfectly aligned/balanced/healthy muscle (whatever that is), that the very act of soft tissue work (even if it doesn’t improve any of those factors) will play a role metabolically. If you stir up tissue (massage/SMR) – you stir up physiology. But is there a way to link dose/response?

4) There are different ways to program metabolic training and most trainers aren’t using them all